And the word manic depression was never attached to what was wrong with him because he had a psychiatrist who didn't believe in it, thought if you put a name on things that it made it worse, and I didn't know it.

But to me he's more interesting as the translator of two peculiarly great and problematic novelists: the Frenchman Georges Perec, whose work is characterized by a manic concern for form, and the Albanian Ismail Kadare, whose work Bellos translates not from the original Albanian, but from French translations supervised by Kadare.